I grabbed the extra clips from my milk crate, then gave the dead soldier another look. Maybe I could help my odds. I ripped off his cyberwear and wrestled the camo jacket on over my T-shirt. Shoved my feet into his largish boots. When I put the helmet on, voices crackled to life in my ear.
“Delta Foxtrot, check your nine!”
“Kitchen is clear.” “Bathrooms are clear.”
“Proceed to secondary targets.”
I thought briefly about how, by sheltering me, Jonathan and his Enders had brought this down on themselves. Then I launched above into the house of God to do some killing.
The sanctuary was thick with the fog of phosphorous grenades. Forms moved through this blue-white landscape in crouched stances, tracking targets in their optics, firing controlled bursts. Most of the monks were already down, their bodies reduced to angular heaps. Some Cadre members had gotten to their weapons and were returning fire from behind overturned desks and pews. An eighteen-year-old kid who’d served me the best chili I’d ever tasted was torn in two when he raised himself too far over the barricade to fire.
Don’t lose it. Tight, stay tight. Use the element of surprise.
A couple soldiers swung toward me, then turned back to their grisly work. My disguise was working. I scuttled over to the nearest heap of bodies. The first charred face I turned over was Jonathan’s. His left eye was blue and full of wonder. His right eye was boiled in its socket.
I welcomed the fury, letting it cloak me, its icicles shattering my indecision and fear. I passed more bodies, the bodies of people I had eaten with, shared laughs with, made plans with…
Mourn them later.
I didn’t bother to crouch. I moved steadily, sighting, firing. I dropped three, then four men. They all shared the same perplexed look as tiny holes in their armor spurted their life’s blood. After my fifth, the voices in my head let me know they’d figured out that one of their own had gone rogue.
I leapt up to the main platform where Jonathan had held services. Behind the toppled lectern, there was an baptismal pool cut into the floor, framed by a thick oak balustrade. I threw myself behind it just as shots blasted past and set a row of drapes on fire. More plasma fire hit the balustrade, singing and cracking the thick wood. Miraculously, it held.
Someone moved in my peripherals. I turned too late. A leg lashed out, catching me in the face. I hit back hard, but a forearm like iron deflected the blow. Another leg swept me from my feet and I tumbled down into the empty baptismal. My gun clattered away down the drain. Knees came down hard on either side of my chest, pinning my arms. A rifle butt cracked me across the jaw. The pain was unholy, threatening to take me all the way to black. I heard a growl of murderous rage.
A familiar growl.
“Max!” I cried through blood. I tried to flip my visor up with furious shakes of my head. “It’s Donner—don’t cook me, pal!”
Max grunted in recognition. He slid off me. “Their body armor—”
“I know.”
I snatched up my Beretta, saying a little prayer of thanks that the drain’s grill had been in place. We heard more screams, more thuds as flesh hit the ground. Four or five soldiers fired from behind two doorframes leading into the main corridor.
“We can’t win this,” I said.
“Downstairs, the tunnel,” Max said. “The hidden exit, past the substation.”
Past the power juncture that Armitage had converted into his anachronistic little office, the Cadre had extended the original tunnel through to the next building, an accountant’s office. It led to a hidden trap door in a utility closet. That meant going back to the basement. But the cellar door was fifteen feet across the sanctuary with nothing between it and us except folding chairs.
Max pointed to a ten-foot bureau that held racks of devotional candles. “Some of our people are behind that thing.”
“Maggie?” I said.
“Don’t know,” he said. He put fingers in his mouth and whistled at them. “Firing cover, my direction,” he barked to me. “I’ll take the right door, you take the left.”
We threw lead and plasma across the sanctuary at the hallway. The soldiers retreated. “Now!” Max screamed. I saw forms launch themselves out from behind the bureau into the mist.
A moment later, Maggie and Tippit were at our sides behind the balustrade. I was never so happy in my entire life.
“Hey,” I said.
“Thank god,” she breathed.
“Time to leave,” I said. Max and I laid down a second volley of cover fire, forcing the soldiers back again. Then we all got up and ran for the basement door.
It was the longest four seconds of my life.
Maggie, Max and I went through the basement door, with Tippit pulling up the rear. I was allowing myself to be amazed that we’d made it out clean when Tippit caught one. His right side dissolved into a brilliant swarm of fireflies. Maggie froze as what remained of him dropped into the stairwell. She started screaming. I pushed her down the steps, slamming the door shut behind us. As I threw the door’s pathetic little sliding bolt, I realized what I was doing and let out a hysterical laugh.
We had maybe two minutes. One for them to realize we weren’t in the sanctuary anymore and another to tactically clear the room before coming after us.
I grabbed the dead soldier’s plasma rifle and incinerated the staircase. In my headset, I could hear organizing commands. We ran to the metal cabinet that opened onto the tunnel.
There was a surreal sense of déjà vu as we ran that tunnel, the lights strobing on and off as they had during my first visit a millennia ago.
We reached Crandall’s cell and paused. I pushed the door open with a finger.
He lay on his cot, fried to a crisp.
“Jesus,” said Maggie.
“Someone’s been down here already,” said Max.
Which meant our exit was probably blown. But we couldn’t go back.
“Oh no.” Foreboding contorted Maggie’s face. She pushed past us and ran pell-mell down the tunnel.
“Maggie!”
She disappeared into the substation. Max and I followed, but paused at the hatch as noises came from further down the tunnel. From the other exit, to the accountancy.
“There must be another squad, holding there, waiting for the sanctuary team to flush us toward them.”
“Then our exit’s blown. What about in here?” I motioned to the substation.
“This door’s the only way in or out.”
“Fuck!” So there it was. Cut off from both ends. Nothing to do but make a stand and take as many of the bastards with us as we could. We went through the hatch.
Time slowed as I saw it.
I wanted to turn my head, but for some reason it wouldn’t cooperate.
Maggie had thrown herself across his lap, weeping. He sat at his cherry law desk, the unlit pipe still in his mouth, a half-smile on his face.
There was mayo on his tie.
Something wanted to tear free from me then. I beat it back, wouldn’t let it loose. I needed the pain to get me through. I closed the hatch and Max ripped some metal bracketing from the wall. He wedged it through the handle, a pathetic finger in the dike, but something, at least. I crossed to Maggie and held her shoulders while she shook.
“Who?” she sobbed. “Who?”
I kicked over Armitage’s desk. His chess board toppled and the little marble pieces scattered, the pawns running for the dark corners of the room. Good for you. Let the kings fight their own fucking war. I toppled the file cabinet as well and shoved it next to the desk, trying to create some kind of barricade.
“Donner,” said Max quietly.
I pulled the Beretta and my spare clips from the jacket. “You’re a better shot than me,” I said, “so I’ll take the plasma rifle. This is a Beretta 9 x 19 Parabellum caliber. Fifteen rounds.” I popped the mag and showed him the action of the Brigadier slide.
“Donner,” he said again.
“It’s not over
,” I said.
He looked at our pathetic bulwark, but nodded.
I motioned again to the gun. “The rounds are Teflon-coated. They penetrate the body armor, so forget the head. Put them right into the chest.”
“You sprayed your bullets with Teflon?”
“Modern gear is designed for energy weapons. It’s not effective against lead.”
“You were expecting a gunfight with soldiers?”
“It’s a hard-knock life.” I handed him the gun and turned to Maggie. “Time to go, Mag.”
“Can’t.” She looked at Armitage’s fried smartscreen. “My exit’s blown, too.”
I surveyed the room. “We’ll hide your heart under the rubble. Once they’re gone, you can rematerialize and get the hell out of here.”
“No.” Armitage’s desk lamp made her tears shine like diamonds.
“Catch a plasma burst when you’re fully formed, and it’ll be over for good, Maggie,” said Max. “Real death.”
“I don’t care.”
“There’s no other way!”
“I don’t care.”
“How admirable,” came a sudden voice from behind us. It issued from the shadows of the relay junction, behind the frozen displays. We whirled, weapons raised.
Jakob stepped into the light. Maggie extended a shaking finger, beyond shock.
“What the fuck?” barked Max.
Maggie threw herself into Jakob’s arms, before I could tell her to wait. Before I could I tell her it wasn’t possible that this man could be here, now.
“How did you—?”
“There’s another way out of this room,” he said to us. He gestured to a steel pipe that ran from the wall to the junction box. It was maybe a meter in diameter, painted and galvanized.
“That’s no good,” said Max. “It’s full of wiring.”
“There’s no time,” said Jakob. He pointed to the walls, and for the first time we noticed small rectangles stuck to them at regular intervals. Rectangles with glowing red lights.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist.
Max hissed. “FOX-7. The whole place is wired.”
“That’s why they haven’t come in yet. They’re just going to fall back outside and bring the whole place down on our heads.”
“As I said, no time,” said Jakob. He went to the conduit where it joined the box. He wrapped his frail academic’s arms around the pipe. What the hell was he thinking?
“It’s welded,” I said. “You’ll never—”
There was an agonized groan of metal as the weld tore. The pipe came away from the juncture in a shower of sparks, exposing the end, full of torn cables and wiring. Maggie was staring at Jakob like he’d sprouted an extra head.
“Old weld,” muttered Max.
Jakob reached his gnarled hands within, wrapping his fingers around the wiring. I couldn’t see past his blue cardigan. There was no way his tiny hands could get a grip on all that conduit, and besides, it would take a metric ton of force—
Then his back was rippling and he was pulling and there was a tremendous wrenching sound, and impossibly, long lengths of wiring and cables came free in his hands. He passed the bundle ends off to us, bucket-brigade style, and we dragged a good twenty feet’s worth clear of the trunk line before we finally came to their jagged ends.
“Should be enough to get us through to the next juncture,” said Jakob.
“Who are you?” I said. “You’re sure as hell not Jakob.”
He pulled idly at his beard. “I’m your only way out.”
“You’re the Lifetaker.”
He merely looked at me.
Maggie, her voice thick as syrup, said, “What?”
“You killed Jakob. Impersonated him,” I said.
“My price,” he said.
“Price?”
“For saving your worthless lives. Now come with me, or die. I don’t care which.”
Maggie threw herself at him before we could even react. He caught her clawed hands and held them while she twisted and spat. I watched his resolution shimmer, watched him go shiny and transparent for a moment. Then he was Jakob again. Maggie seemed to run out of steam, sagging. He released her and she collapsed sobbing into my arms.
“Let’s go,” I said. “First we survive. The rest later.”
“I can’t do this,” said Maggie.
“Maggie,” said Max. “Your memory—of the lab, Crandall’s interrogation, this raid. You have to survive so that you can upload it to the Conch. It’s all we have left to fight them with.” Max put a hand against her cheek. “Too many of my friends have died today,” he said.
She blinked back the moisture in her eyes and turned them with pure hate to the Lifetaker.
“Alright,” she said. “Lead on, you miserable piece of shit.”
47
DONNER
The next few hours were a jumble of cement tunnels, dank air, stumbling and heavy breathing. The Lifetaker led us through the pipe into an empty chamber beyond. From there it was deeper into the bowels of the city and away from the battle.
We heard the church go. Down here, it sounded like the world ending. Maybe it was.
When the explosions faded, Max pulled me aside. “This thing killed the Surazal doctors! And Hector Alvarez! And Jakob!” he whispered. “Why the hell are we trusting it?”
“We don’t trust it, Max,” I replied. “We follow it.”
“We should destroy it now!”
“You know how to get out of here, do you?”
The others walked back to us. “Is there a problem?” it asked.
“Where the fuck are you taking us?” said Max.
“Beyond the Blister.”
“That’s impossible. We’re infectious!”
“You pose no risk to the world.”
“You kill people for fun,” barked Max. “We’re supposed to take your word for it?”
The Lifetaker shimmered. “I shall scout the tunnel ahead. You have two minutes.”
“Like hell,” I said. “I want some answers. Now.”
“Your questions will be answered, but not by me,” it replied. “For now, your choice is to hold your miserable tongues and do what I say or I will kill you right here.”
I had the feeling that this thing could do exactly what it said.
Maggie reddened. “Stop manifesting as Jakob.”
Its face contorted into the rictus of a grin. “No. It causes you pain.”
I wanted to knock that smirk off its synthetic mug. “We don’t move until you drop the charade.”
It sighed. And like the snap of a finger, Jakob was gone and the Lifetaker appeared in its true form. It undulated in the air like a floating oil slick, its shape vaguely human. Rough amalgams of eyes, nose and mouth flowed incompletely across its “head,” but they were constantly changing, constantly in motion. Its “feet” brushed the surface of the ground without touching it. The thing moved with an obscene ripple that raised my hackles and churned a wave of nausea in my gut. I had never seen anything so completely wrong. In the dim tunnel, it was truly monstrous.
“Two minutes,” it said, its voice no longer close to human. It moved off down the tunnel.
Maggie whirled to me, her eyes wild. “Kill him, Donner! We’ll take our chances!”
For some reason, in a day filled with horrors, her sudden bloodthirstiness hurt the worst. I’d come to rely on Maggie’s pacifism to balance my ever-present desire to lash out in rage. What an ironic symbol of this counterclockwise world—that an artificial person should become the anchor for my humanity.
“Armitage, Jonathan… they’re gone,” I said. “We won’t last ten minutes out there with Nicole’s patrols and biometric wasps. This thing is our only chance right now. Besides, we need to get some questions answered. The thing has as much as admitted that it’s only helping us because it’s under orders. I very much want to find out whose orders those are.”
“You really think we can leave Necropolis?” asked Max.
“Safely?”
I rubbed sweat from my eyes. “Crandall said we could leave Necropolis too, remember?”
Max cracked his walnut-sized knuckles. They sounded like gunshots in the tunnel. “Big risk to take with the whole world,” he said. “You wanna carry that freight?”
“Screw the world,” I said.
“Donner!” Maggie gasped.
“The Shift virus isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. It doesn’t kill anything. Worst case scenario, more dead people come back. The world’s precious status quo gets upset again. You know what? Maybe it’s time the world learned to live with it.”
They were silent. The Lifetaker flowed back, solidifying into a six-foot amoeba. I could barely keep my eyes on it. It offended every animal instinct I had.
“Have we a verdict?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Go fuck yourself. In the meantime, we’ll keep following.”
It seemed to find amusement in that.
***
We made our way uptown through a maze of auxiliary corridors and service tunnels. We kept a good distance from human activity. Occasionally I could hear the rumble of the subway, and once I caught the dee-ding! of its doors opening, but down here, with all the echoes, it could have been three feet or a million miles away.
At a junction, the Lifetaker produced some flashlights from a cached bag. We used the beams to explore our subterranean surroundings. The corridors were narrow and utilitarian, empty except for the mesh-covered corpses of light bulbs or rusted metal drains. Water trickled past our feet, carrying the occasional candy wrapper or soda can. On the street this morning, the wind had blown fresh and cold, but down here it tasted stagnant and worn out. My face was caked with grime. I was coated with cobwebs, crushed insects and worse, but there was nothing clean with which I could wipe my face. My T-shirt had been a hand-me-down from Armitage. I could smell his pipe on it. It made me want to scream.
By the time we’d covered three or four miles, my arms were quivering. The shakes. A massive amount of adrenaline had dumped into my system during the fight, and now I was paying for it.
I was getting flashes from the battle—little mental instant replays. Dead monks, limbs askew. Jonathan, who’d nursed me from the brink of madness with saint-like patience. Armitage, light leaking through his eyes from the hole in the back of his head. My mind was trying to process what had happened. I couldn’t let it. As long as my emotions stayed in deep freeze, I could function. But when they started to thaw, things would get bad. Real bad.
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